Search - the future of business, information, life as we know it?

[Cadaverous Pallor]

I just read Search by John Battelle. He's the co-founding editor of Wired magazine, and an industry insider. This book is about search - Google and all it's predecessors and rivals. It's got an amazing history on each search engine, and the business/power plays behind them. It brings you entirely up to date - ok, maybe up to the date it was written - and forecasts the future of search.

Battelle points out just how revolutionary the concept of search is, and as a result, how revolutionary the internet is. The power that Google has at the moment is extraordinary, and yet, this is still the infancy of the information age, the tip of the iceberg.

I really loved this. As a wanna-be tech geek it was just tech enough to teach me something but not so tech that I couldn't understand it. Basic programming concepts are written in a very accessible way. What really moves the book are the various stories, from AltaVista's rise and fall to Google's IPO. As a full-fledged member of the internet community I was surprised at how much I didn't know about the technology and the business end. The cultural implications are staggering...

Yes, this is a book review, but definitely a book for Egg Heads and wanna-be Egg Heads like me. I highly recommend it!